Psychedelic Noir
Thomas Pynchon Gums Up the Summer of Love

By John Hood

If Sam Spade preferred pot to highballs and huaraches to wingtips, he might’ve come off like Doc Sportello. Of course, he’d have to have been shorter (Hey, Bogie pulled it off in The Maltese Falcon!), and considerably hairier (afros, anyone?). And he’d have to have been swingin’ the LA beachfront rather than the San Francisco Bay in two entirely different eras. Yet both private eyes maintain what William DeAndrea calls their “own private, unorthodox, but absolutely inviolable code of ethics” (Encyclopedia Mysteriosa). And that’s what makes ’em classic.

OK, so Sportello does his maintaining by flashback and accident. But he’s still a classic. Then again, he was created to core a story by one of our all-time great neo-classicists.

That story is Inherent Vice (Penguin Press, $27.95), a psychedelic noir told by no less a scribe than Thomas Pynchon. Yes, the very same cat who countered the culture with Gravity’s Rainbow has written what could be best described as a counter-culture crime novel. Like all good crime novels, there’s violence and bloodshed galore. Unlike most though, Pynchon’s pulp goes way down deep while it reaches for the stars.

Or for the star-crossed. Sportello’s torn between two women — a conflict-riddled ADA named Penny who thinks the devotion the Mansonettes show Charlie is kinda “cute,” and his ex, Shasta Fay, who’s about to disappear with or without a flamboyant developer named Mickey Wolfmann, who may or may not be mobbed-up, murdered, or a secret member of a nefarious entity called the Golden Fang.    

Doc’s also a stoner — big time. In fact the occasions when he’s not under the influence of the Almighty Weed are so few and far between it’s hard to say whether or not there even are any. Be that as it may, those perennially bloodshot eyes tend to have people underestimating the Lebowski-like sleuth, especially a cop named Bigfoot, who’s convinced Doc can’t even remember his own name.

The story starts when Shasta Fay shows up asking Doc to help her unravel some insidious plot to rid Wolfmann of his riches — and his sanity. Sportello, of course, has no choice but to comply. After all, he’s still got a hard-on for the gal. And it’s not like Doc was really doing anything anyway.

From there on out it’s nothing but a whirlwind waft of pot smoke and smog, subterfuge and psychosomosis — all tuned to a ’60s soundtrack that’s at once obscure (“Wild Man” Fischer, Fapardokly) and invented (Droolin’ Floyd Womack, Meatball Flag).

It’s also loaded with high color character. There’s an in-house surf band with a mansionful of members (The Boards). A not-dead dead guy who’s frontin’ for Big Brother (Coy Harlingen). A maritime mouthpiece who takes bites out of Doc’s “crimes” (Sauncho Smilax). And that barbwire-collecting cop, Bigfoot Bjornsen, who’s partial to chocolate-covered frozen bananas and the Waste-a-Perp Target Range.

Bigfoot is supposedly the foil. But Doc’s so dopey he mostly foils himself. Then again, any gumshoe that operates under the auspices of L.S.D. Investigations is liable to be a little loopy.

And a little paranoid. Still, despite Doc’s constant delving into delusions, he always snaps back into his “old wised-up self, short on optimism, ready to be played for a patsy. Normal.”

Beneath and beyond the story, which is crazy and circuitous and sly, Vice reads like a lost love letter to the city of Los Angeles, both real and imagined. There’s place: Musso and Frank’s, Wallach’s Music City, The Raincheck Room, as well as the smattering of eateries on Pico. And there’s time: the ass-end of “the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light.” And there’s also lament, for a place and a time when the outsider could roam those city streets free and unfettered.

Doc’s an old-fashioned nobleman, the kind that “belonged to a single and ancient martial tradition in which resisting authority, subduing hired guns, defending your old lady’s honor all amounted to the same thing.” Like Spade, and a little later, Marlowe, he’s a walk-alone. One of those rare and curious creatures for whom having the courage of their convictions is merely second nature.

In that respect, he’s very much like the ever elusive Mr. Pynchon himself, who apparently never met a man strong enough to pull him off course. And damn good thing too, ’cause had Mr. Pynchon allowed himself to stray, it’s highly unlikely he’d ever have stooped to such great heights.

Psychedelic Noir. Now that’s a genre.

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